erics head

I watched this week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory tonight and, although it was episode six of the season, it was only the second good episode (in my opinion; the first being the one where Raj was going to be deported). What happened to this show? It used to be ‘must see, tv’ for me, but it’s lost it’s chemistry.

First, the writers seem to have forgotten that this is an ensemble show — these four guys and one girl used to all hang out together for ‘Halo night’ or ‘Comic Book Store night’, but now it’s Leonard and Penny, sometimes Sheldon… and the other two. The Sheldon-Penny friendship had grown to the point where it very often stole the show, and they had one of these moments this week when Sheldon comes over to borrow some bread, but generally this season it’s been reduced to a few off-hand insults or side comments. As for Raj and Wolowitz, they’re starting to play-up the bromance they have just a little too much; it’s almost as if the writers didn’t see it happening until they made a point of it in the episode where Leonard’s mom comes to visit. My recommendation: put everyone back in the guy’s apartment, order some take-away and start the tape rolling.

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We’ve been following the Battle of the Blades competition at my house since it started. Tonight, we had the pleasure of actually going down to the historic Maple Leaf Gardens for a live taping of the week five performance show! Hard to believe, but tickets for the show are just $8/person; however, there are only 3000 seats per showing and most of them (seemed to have been) sold or given away to friends, family and various skating groups. If you’re interested in going down, you’d better act fast: tickets are available Monday’s starting at noon for the show two weeks later. We got ours right at noon; within minutes the public tickets were all gone.

As for tonight’s show, the final four pairs put on a really good performance. My favourites — Sale & Simpson — put on a great pairs routine and did really well in the special group demonstration. While I think they’ll be safe tomorrow night, I think it’s sadly time for Hough-Sweeney & Domi to hang up the skates. They’ve been great this round, but they’re slowing slipping behind the competition.

If you haven’t checked out the show yet, I suggest you do before it’s over. The (Vancouver) 2010 Winter Olympics are coming up in just under 100 days now, so you can just consider it some fun practice for that (if you’re looking for an excuse). Enjoy!

Years ago, when I had a friend working in the Philippines, I had the awesome opportunity to visit SE Asia. While I was there, we visited the Glorietta Mall (among many other things; please don’t think that the mall was the highlight!), which was quite impressive… but what caught my attention was, of course, the music store: Music One.

My friend had already sent me, shortly after he’d arrived in the country, some Original Pilipino Music (OPM) which really impressed me, so I had to hear more. Sure, this is a chain store in an up-scale mall, but a sales chart is a sales chart and I was looking more for the ‘popular music’, not the ground-breaking indie stuff… combined with what I’d heard on MTV-Asia and what had been recommended to me since I’d arrived, I think I bought four CDs (should have probably bought more).

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I know it’s been awhile since I’ve written, and I know I have the Scott Pilgrim series of entries only partway done, and you’re waiting to find out what happened with the house and so on and so on… but I got the urge to write about this today so I’m just going to go with it. I think I’ve been spending too much time waiting to feel like writing more about the house or whatever and not just about ‘anything’ so here goes. With any luck, writing about ‘whatever’ will get me writing about those things I’d started writing about before. If that makes any sense at all. So, without further delay, here is tonight’s post:

The Tragically Hip seem to be one of those “you get them, or you don’t” bands, especially for people outside of Canada… maybe even Ontario. Me? I get them… well, I used to at least. Regardless, this post is just about one album: Day for Night. The Hip have always been summer music for me, and this weekend I decided to throw on a bunch of it in the car and listen to some favourite tracks. After that, I listened through Fully Completely and then… then, today I put in Day for Night.

I remember buying this album. I bought it together with REM’s Monster at the little music store down the road from where I lived at the time. I don’t often listen to Monster any more, but this album still calls me from time to time. When the first notes of “Grace, Too” slid through my car speakers today, it took me right back to the first time I heard them. Right from the start you know this album is going to be different. Good- different. Really, really good, different. I’m no music critic, so I’m not going to try and explain why I love this album so much, but I do. There are so many good tracks here, with just out-right excellent tracks mixed in between.

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Like so many ‘best laid plans’, this one has been delayed by a day as a result of a short blackout last night. You see, after such a long break in posting, I’d intended this post to appear three months to the day of the previous entry… oh well. Three months and one day it is.

Now, why the delay? Why the break? Because I’ve moved! For a blog that was founded on my adventures in buying my first house, ironically, it was derailed when I left nearly five years later. While I don’t believe I have anyone stalking me on-line, nor did I ever publish the address (or even the city) where I lived, a little paranoia when publishing on the web never hurts.

That aside, let’s start back at the beginning: the new house! Way back in October or November last year, My Girlfriend and I decided to buy a house and move-in together. We looked at new homes, but the closing dates were too far away for what we wanted. We looked around at re-sales for awhile, but never found anything that we really loved. The idea of getting to pick all our own colours and finishes was still very tempting to us, despite the idea of (again) living with gravel driveways and dirt yards for an undetermined period of time.

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Continuing on from where I left off a few weeks ago, I just finished re-reading the first two volumes of the Scott Pilgrim series tonight. The second read-through really seems to bring the story together, or at least it did for me. Knowing the characters and the plot allowed me to enjoy the drawings and such more this time around. It also helps distinguish between the dream sequences and reality or the parts where the story kinda flips back and forth between two places without any warning (e.g., pages 6-7 will be in one place, then 8-9 will be elsewhere, but 10-11 will be back to the first scene, etc.); again, could just be that I’m not used to the conventions of a graphic novel yet.

There isn’t a lot of deliberate character development, like you’d find at the start of a movie, somehow I seem to have a much better connection to the main characters after this second read. I’m not a fast reader, but the relatively short length of the books makes it easy (and enjoyable) to breeze through them in a night, and like I’ve already said here, there is a good amount of re-read value to be had: video game references to pick-up, visual gags in the artwork, etc. I don’t know what the author’s grand plan was for the slow release schedule (read: one volume every ~12 months) — I can only assume that’s how long it takes to draw a story like this — but both the art and overall quality of the story has improved in the second volume.

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Wow, tomorrow is the last day of March. I don’t know where the month went.

I apologize for the low post count this month, but to be honest I have a few really good looking posts sitting around as drafts right now; I don’t want to rush them to press however. The highlight of these would be the two-, three- or four- part series on the music industry that I’ve been working on. This started as a re-hash of a conversation I had with my fellow carpoolie one night and has since expanded from there. The initial seed for the conversation is simple: why does the music industry continue to release proper albums? Hasn’t the iTMS all but ended the reign of the LP? This simple idea became too big for one post, so I’ve split it into two separate posts: why the album is better and why singles should rule. Related to this, over the past year or so we’ve started to see a lot of remastered and ‘expanded’ albums coming out. How does this play into the album vs. the single argument? Furthermore, if I purchased the original album (on vinyl or otherwise), why should I have to pay (full price) for the reissue? And fourthly(?), the role of the label seems to be changing/in danger these days as some established acts are stepping out on their own to embrace the internet and social networking; what does this mean for the future of music?

I don’t know if any of this is really ground breaking or not, but after many conversations about this stuff and some timely releases and announcements it seems like as good a time as any for me to throw my two cents into the pot.

On a more personal note, April is looking to be a very big month for me with a rather substantial announcement likely to be made towards the end of April or early May; stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I’ll try to get the music posts flowing, updates on Scott Pilgrim (just finished the second book last night; good stuff!) out to everyone, a few choice wallpapers that I’ve used over the years up here for your enjoyment (any screen resolution requests?), and who knows whatever else will come along.

Happy spring everyone.